WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE?

Bob Benze
Sept 2006

In a nutshell, Environmental Justice is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied to environmental protection by way of Executive Order 12898 signed by President Clinton on February 11, 1994. The EO requires that "Each Federal agency shall ensure that all programs or activities receiving Federal financial assistance that affect human health or the environment do not directly, or through contractual or other arrangements, use criteria, methods, or practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin".

EPA defines Environmental Justice (EJ) as the "fair treatment for people of all races, cultures, and incomes, regarding the development of environmental laws, regulations, and policies." EPA published their Environmental Justice Strategy April 3, 1995, and their Implementation Plan in April 1996. In these, the EPA committed that:

• No segment of the population, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, as a result of EPA's policies, programs, and activities, suffers disproportionately from adverse human health or environmental effects, and all people live in clean and sustainable communities.

• Those who must live with environmental decisions - community residents, environmental groups, State, Tribal, and local governments, businesses - must have every opportunity for public participation in the making of those decisions. An informed and involved local community is a necessary and integrated part of the process to protect the environment.

The central theme of Environmental Justice under the EPA has been that authorities must effectively address any disproportionate risks borne by low-income and minority communities. EPA has taken a number of actions, including promulgating guidance for investigating Title VI administrative complaints that challenge permits, and they have established a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) as a high-level forum to allow all parties to express their environmental justice concerns.

Environmental activists and social justice proponents have strongly embraced the environmental justice cause since the early 1980s, charging, among other things, that minority communities have been the targets of environmental racism. Although generally lacking credible scientific evidence to support these allegations, these groups use images of increased instances of illness, primarily cancer, to mobilize citizens against industrial complexes located, or planned to be located, near minority communities. They use terms such as "multiple, cumulative and synergistic risk" to appear credible - invariably without being able to cite any supporting data.

Their approach is to make demands on business and government - using government agency procedures, the courts, and public opinion. The goal is to force the diversion of private and/or public resources to the disadvantaged community - often to correct quality of life problems such as odors, noise, and congestion that have little bearing on health or environmental risk.

Lacking technical findings, the activists resort to inflammatory rhetoric to bring fear to a community - with the message to agencies that "we suspect these industries pose a disproportionate risk and it is your job to fix this problem". They often prevail because it is nearly impossible to disprove a negative.

One of the real injustices of Environmental Justice is that it doesn't address the tradeoff of risk vs. jobs. Experts generally agree that the primary health risks to minority communities result from the problems associated with being poor, not from being located near an industrial complex. Indeed, being near an industry which provides direct jobs, and which supports an even larger number of service-industry jobs, will invariably result in a wealthier and healthier community.

The unfortunate result is that proposed industrial plants have been cancelled in a number of locations directly due to pressures applied by the environmental justice movement. Existing plants have been subject to advocacy to reduce emissions below criteria already deemed safe by the EPA, and/or to provide some form of compensation to the affected disadvantaged community. In some cases this coercion has contributed to plant closures and the resultant moving of jobs offshore.

Thus, there is uncertainty whether the net result of Environmental Justice is to help or hurt the minority communities it was intended to serve. In any case, it does provide additional employment for bureaucrats, lawyers, consultants, and others. It has also significantly increased the complexity of growth management planning.

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